Your weekly selection of awesome robot videos

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We’ll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next two months; here’s what we have so far (send us your events!):

When power is lost due to natural or man-made disasters, it is a top priority to get the power network restored as quickly as possible. But if the existing infrastructure is destroyed, what do you do? These autonomous ground robots can be deployed to establish a mobile microgrid.

Muscular activity contains information on motion intention. By decoding the muscular activity of an arm during reachig-to-grasp motions, Billard Lab was able to detect grasp type in the early stages of a reaching motion which enables fast activation of a robotic hand by teleoperation.

AirSim is a simulator for drones (and soon other vehicles) built on Unreal Engine. It is open-source, cross platform and supports hardware-in-loop with popular flight controllers such as Pixhawk for physically and visually realistic simulations. It is developed as an Unreal plugin that can simply be dropped in to any Unreal environment you want. Our goal is to develop AirSim as a platform for AI research to experiment with deep learning, computer vision and reinforcement learning algorithms for autonomous vehicles. For this purpose, AirSim also exposes APIs to retrieve data and control vehicles in a platform independent way.

Demo of the NAIST OpenHand M2S on a Kuka LBR iiwa robot arm, showing off material recognition, bed making, and tucking. The design is open-source, 3D-printable and uses two OptoForce 3D force sensors. Based on the Yale OpenHand M2 design.

What’s the ground truth on artificial intelligence (AI)? In this video, John Launchbury, the Director of DARPA’s Information Innovation Office (I2O), attempts to demystify AI--what it can do, what it can’t do, and where it is headed. Through a discussion of the "three waves of AI" and the capabilities required for AI to reach its full potential, John provides analytical context to help understand the roles AI already has played, does play now, and could play in the future.